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103The historical turn in the study of adaptationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 511-532. 1996.A number of philosophers and ‘evolutionary psychologists’ have argued that attacks on adaptationism in contemporary biology are misguided. These thinkers identify anti-adaptationism with advocacy of non-adaptive modes of explanation. They overlook the influence of anti-adaptationism in the development of more rigorous forms of adaptive explanation. Many biologists who reject adaptationism do not reject Darwinism. Instead, they have pioneered the contemporary historical turn in the study of adapt…Read more
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1Adaptive Explanation and the Concept of a VestigeIn David L. Hull (ed.), A review of Paul Griffiths (ed.), Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of Biology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1992, 276 pp. $96.00, Kluwer. pp. 111-131. 1994.
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2770Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religionIn James Maclaurin Greg Dawes (ed.), A New Science of Religion, Routledge. 2012.Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that ev…Read more
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1Evolutionary Perspectives on EmotionIn Alfred W. Kazniak (ed.), Emotions, Qualia and Consciousness, World Scientific. pp. 106--123. 2001.Evolutionary Psychology links the methodology for cognitive science associated with the late David Marr to evolutionary theory. The mind is conceived as a bundle of modules which can be described at three theoretical levels. Each module represents an adaptation to some specific ecological problem. Evolutionary psychologists try to derive the highest level of description using a heuristic method called 'adaptive thinking'. This paper questions the value of the official EP methodology and reassert…Read more
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491Signals that make a DifferenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2017.Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure of information. Although S…Read more
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135Dancing in the dark: Evolutionary psychology and the argument from designIn Steven Scher & Frederick Rauscher (eds.), Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 135--160. 2001.The Narrow Evolutionary Psychology Movement represents itself as a major reorientation of the social/behavioral sciences, a group of sciences previously dominated by something called the ‘Standard Social Science Model’. Narrow Evolutionary Psychology alleges that the SSSM treated the mind, and particularly those aspects of the mind that exhibit cultural variation, as devoid of any marks of its evolutionary history. Adherents of Narrow Evolutionary Psychology often suggest that the SSSM owed more…Read more
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Lehrman's dictum: Information and explanation in developmental biologyDevelopmental Psychobiology 55 (1): 22--32. 2013.
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15Book Reviews : Alexander Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science. Westview, Boulder, CO, 1988. Pp. xiv, 218, $35.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 290-293. 1991.
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57Behavioral genetics and development: Historical and conceptual causes of controversyNew Ideas in Psychology 26 (3): 332-352. 2008.Traditional, quantitative behavioral geneticists and developmental psychobiologists such as Gilbert Gottlieb have long debated what it would take to create a truly developmental behavioral genetics. These disputes have proven so intractable that disputants have repeatedly suggested that the problem rests on their opponents' conceptual confusion; whilst others have argued that the intractability results from the non-scientific, political motivations of their opponents. The authors provide a diffe…Read more
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183Innateness, canalization, and 'biologicizing the mind'Philosophical Psychology 21 (3). 2008.This article examines and rejects the claim that 'innateness is canalization'. Waddington's concept of canalization is distinguished from the narrower concept of environmental canalization with which it is often confused. Evidence is presented that the concept of environmental canalization is not an accurate analysis of the existing concept of innateness. The strategy of 'biologicizing the mind' by treating psychological or behavioral traits as if they were environmentally canalized physiologica…Read more
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332What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological CategoriesUniversity of Chicago Press. 1997.Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects...
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148GeneIn David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge University Press. 2005.The historian Raphael Falk has described the gene as a ‘concept in tension’ (Falk 2000) – an idea pulled this way and that by the differing demands of different kinds of biological work. Several authors have suggested that in the light of contemporary molecular biology ‘gene’ is no more than a handy term which acquires a specific meaning only in a specific scientific context in which it occurs. Hence the best way to answer the question ‘what is a gene’, and the only way to provide a truly philos…Read more
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128The distinction between innate and acquired characteristicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia. This entry, however, focuses on twe…Read more
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204The misuse of Sober's selection for/selection of distinctionBiology and Philosophy 10 (1): 99-108. 1995.Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. …Read more
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Philosophy of Mind |
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